Mexico Kills Cartel Big Shot, But Drug Violence Worsens

Photo: Fronteras Desk/Flickr

For months, Mexico’s army has gradually moved thousands of troops into territory controlled by the country’s largest and arguably most dangerous drug cartel. The mission: kill or capture the top bosses of the Zetas, right in the heart of their prime terrain. Last week the manhunt started paying dividends, as the army took out a senior cartel leader during a major shootout — although it came at the cost of turning a Mexican city into a warzone.

According to local press reports, the hours-long battle began on Thursday in the border city of Nuevo Laredo, when forces loyal to the boss of a major Zetas drug trafficking operation, Gerardo Guerra-Valdez, attacked military personnel moving on the cartel’s “command structure.” When the military fought back, cartel gunmen began blockading key roads stretching from the city’s downtown, near the World Trade Bridge connecting Nuevo Laredo to Texas. They came prepared: included in their convoy was at least one armored vehicle, rocket and grenade launchers, lots of rifles and, predictably, cocaine.

But that was it for Guerra-Valdez. Along with three Mexican soldiers and 13 cartel gunmen, the Zetas boss, who goes by El Guerra or “The War” — yes, really — didn’t survive the battle. He was the second-in-command to Miguel Angel Trevino, a former army commando turned top Zetas enforcer, according to the Mexican armed forces.

It’s probably too early to draw broad lessons from the shootout for Mexico’s war against the cartels. But El Guerra was only eight months on the job — and his predecessor was also killed by the army. The cartels have waged a silent war in Nuevo Laredo — a campaign characterized by nighttime assassinations, kidnappings and attacks on social media users. Finally, the army has scored some successes in its counteroffensive — but for Nuevo Laredo, it may get worse before it gets better, especially as rival gangs move in to capitalize on the Zetas’ loss.

El Guerra wasn’t dead for three days before more fighting was reported at a strip mall in the city’s south side. Gunmen also opened fire inside a Peter Piper Pizza restaurant. Someone even threw a grenadeinto a Walmart. All those attacks were more conspicuous than usual. “Gerardo,” a pseudonymous writer for a website that tracks the drug war, Borderland Beat, said the conflict between the Army and the Zetas “has taken a bloody turn for the worse” — despite El Guerra’s death.

Theories abound that the attack could be a sign that forces from the rival Gulf Cartel are moving into the city and “heating up the plaza,” in drug war lingo.

If so, they’ll find the place heavily fortified. Earlier this year, the Mexican army began building a string of new bases across the Zetas’ stomping grounds of Tamaulipas — which includes Nuevo Laredo — to support some 13,000 soldiers currently patrolling the state. This means nearly 30 percent of the Mexican army’s counter-cartel troops are fortifying directly in the Zetas’ homeland. (More are fighting the Zetas and other cartels elsewhere.) It’s a sign that the army sees the Zetas as its top cartel threat.

Four of the new bases will be built in Tamaulipas proper, from a strip of land stretching up the Texas border down to Reynosa and into Mexico’s badlands. Another will be in neighboring Nuevo Leon, also Zetas territory. Two more bases will be built elsewhere: one in Chihuahua, where the rival Sinaloa Cartel is strong, and another to the southwest in Michoacan, which has seen the Zetas move in to counter a Sinaloa assault against the declining La Familia Michoacana gang. The plan is to retake areas where “local authorities were overwhelmed by organized crime and drug trafficking,” according to the local Excelsior newspaper.

Additionally, even if the army manages the arduous tasks of keeping the Zetas down and its rivals out, the basic dynamics fueling the cartels will stay unchanged. Vice President Joe Biden, who’s spending this week in Mexico and Honduras, pushed back against calls by Latin American leaders, including Mexico’s President Felipe Calderon, to consider “market alternatives” to the drug war. Like, say, decriminalizing or legalizing the cartels’ chief source of revenue, thereby undercutting them and removing the need for a costly, bloody war.